One of the hardest things to get right when it comes to M4Dev, is content. This is especially true when working on complex and sensitive topics such as gender based violence, where even mentioning the subject can be considered taboo.

And yet it’s also an area where the dissemination of basic information is key to making a difference - a global consultation of Gender Based Violence (GBV) academics and practitioners shows that the second most useful intervention you can make is educating women and men about women’s rights.(1)

In Benin, where we recently kicked off design work on a project aiming to use ICTs to support GBV prevention & response, women and girls’ right to be protected from violence are enshrined in a law passed five years ago. However, when consulting with peer educators in the rural communities we’re working in, we discovered that people often had no knowledge of these laws. And yet peer educators reported that it was the communication and discussion about this information that seemed to cause the biggest impact.

We also noticed that there are multiple initiatives addressing GBV, including toll-free advice lines and an online platform, but most people have never heard of them. Peer educators working for different NGOs are not following a standardised approach to education on this topic, and often receive topics via WhatsApp which they are expected to develop independently into sensitisation activities.

These three discoveries represented interesting entry points both in terms of ICT and content creation: there is a lack of knowledge about key information, and a lack of reliable, unified resources for educators to use. At the same time, peer educators are already using mobile to help them in their work: as a communication tool as well as a research tool.

Because we wanted to use a fairly agile process incorporating principles of Human Centered Design, we decided to run with these entry points and see how we could improve the accessibility, availability and awareness of these different types of content using mobile.

The co-creation process

We started by creating an eco-system map identifying the actors involved in knowledge transfer and dialogue creation around GBV and other related topics. In our case this includes local women, members of ‘Men’s Committees’ who have received training on gender based violence, local authorities who deal with cases of GBV, Peer Educators, and young people, who tend to have higher literacy levels than their parents, and also play the role of ‘tech support’ in their homes, facilitating their parents' use of mobile.

Next, we made a shortlist of the key pieces of information identified as valuable by stakeholders: laws concerning acts of physical, emotional and economic violence against women and girls, as well as information on family planning, women’s inheritance rights, and pregnancy spacing.

Because many of the participants can't read or write, and don't all speak the same language, we will be prioritising visual and oral activities like role play and drawing, and using many, many emojis. Through this process we hope to gain a better understanding of existing knowledge levels, influence and communication networks, gather stories of success, challenges and needs, whilst also accomplishing something tangible in the form of messages that will be sent out to peer networks as we go.

The assumptions we want to test

We're under no illusion that this idea is a definitive solution to the problem of GBV in these communities, however, we want to give the simplest ideas that emerge from the discovery process the chance to thrive and evolve, or be discarded, as quickly as possible. We will ultimately be looking to test the following assumptions:

Community members are more likely to pay attention to communications created by other, trusted community members.

Content topics identified as relevant by local stakeholders are more likely to have an impact than those decided on by central stakeholders

Messages will be shared with others once received - creating a viral effect amongst community members

Mobiles are an effective way of transmitting such messages

Confirming or disproving any of these will be a vital step in our design process, so stay tuned for a follow-up blog on the outcome of the co-creation workshops and how this informs our next activities. Ultimately, this type of ICT initiative will only have an impact if executed alongside a holistic programme aimed to address GBV at an individual, social, and institutional level. Emojis alone will never be enough, but we will at least be able to assess if they could be a key component of a wider set of interventions.

This project is being lead by OneWorld for UNFPA Benin. Feel free to drop a comment if you're interested in learning more!

I am typing this out from Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi reflecting on the past week spent with the good people of UN Habitat, specifically those associated with the CityRAP tool. The CityRAP tool trains city managers and municipal technicians in small to intermediate sized cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to understand and plan actions aimed at reducing risk and building resilience through the elaboration of a City Resilience Action Plan.

A few caveats at the onset here. This reads a bit more like an academic piece which it largely is. It is drawn from something larger I wrote a bit ago for another paper. It might also read like an attack on the SDGs, which is not my point. The point here is that the SDGs have generated some incredible results and I sincerely support them, but we must be mindful of what is being mobilised in our pursuit of them. My focus is education and I suggest that the provisions of the SDGs related specifically to that field suggest particular scaled interventions (or at least make those approaches particularly attractive). Scale exacts pressure on particular types of education.

As part of my association with the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh (a version of this post appears there as well), I recently traveled with colleagues to deliver a three day workshop on digital education for Syrian academics who have been displaced by the conflict. The University has worked for a long time with the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), a great organisation providing urgently-needed help to academics in immediate danger, those forced into exile, and many who choose to work on in their home countries despite serious risks.

We seem to have endless ideas on how to use Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). From job creation to women’s empowerment to civic participation, a number of ICT4D interventions have been developed and implemented over the years. Common question asked in my work is “what type of technology that might have biggest impact in our society in the coming years?”. As we have learned, ICTs in itself aren’t sufficient. While factors contributing to the success of ICT4D have become apparent, and many have written about them, I feel there's still a need to highlight some of them.

We have been some of the most vocal critics of Bridge International Academies (BIA), largely because most investigations and evaluations of their edtech impact to improve schooling in sub-Saharan Africa have been less than spectacular (many would say the impact is non-existent). So imagine our surprise to see Wayan Vota's latest ICTworks™ post highlighting the successes of BIA in Liberia.

We need to make women in innovation more visible, and correct the gender imbalance in the stories we tell. We need to tell more stories about the women working at the top of humanitarian innovation, and so today I sat down with Tanya Accone, Senior Advisor at UNICEF Innovation, to tell the story of a woman working at the top of a very visible humanitarian innovation team for a very visible humanitarian agency.

We do a lot of work on open learning as well and it was clear there was tension between these open educational platforms (like Coursera, edX, etc.) and their use in local contexts, particularly in emerging economies. There is tension there. Open educational technologies are too often framed as a transparent instrument for educational export, keeping (specifically Western or Global North) curricula, pedagogy, and educational values intact whilst they are broadcast to a global population in deficit.

I remember when I first started hearing the buzz about bots. My first thought? 'Here we go again...' - a reaction to the endless cycles of hype followed by business-as-usual that typifies the digital sector. However, over the past few months I've had the opportunity to design a few 'bots 4 good', and I'd like to share what I've learned: how they work, what they could be useful for, and where to start if you'd like to get one. I believe that done well, they could be really useful add-ons to your digital strategy as they provide a rich 'in-between' space for mobile users who aren't fully digitally literate.

Last week, I was at TICTeC 2018 where researchers, activists and practitioners discussed the impact of civic technology, or civic tech. This blogpost summarises the discussion of Two heads are better than one: working with governments.